On Parliament Hill

With the debate on electoral reform heating up, many Canadians may be wondering: why should this matter to me?

In the last federal election in October of 2015, the Liberals were elected on a platform which included a commitment to ensure that the next election would not be conducted under the first-past-the-post voting system. This was an extremely vague campaign commitment, especially when you consider that they stopped short of explaining what their proposed alternative might be.

Six months later there is still a serious lack of clarity, yet the Liberals have begun the process of changing the way we vote. Just recently, Liberal Ministers Dominic LeBlanc and Maryam Monsef announced the Liberal Government’s plan to form a special committee to examine possible changes to the voting system. Instead of doing the right thing when forming this committee – making sure that the votes of all Canadians count – the Liberals opted to entrench their majority and deny committee voting rights to half of the opposition parties.

Despite receiving less than 40 percent of the popular vote, the Liberals have given themselves 6 of the 10 seats on the committee. To be fair, this is the standard formula used based on the number of seats each party has in the House. The problem is that the Liberals are arguing that the voting system which got them elected is unfair and illegitimate. How then can they claim to be consulting all Canadians when they stack the deck in their favour right from the start?

The reality is they aren’t actually seeking consensus on this issue. This committee was formed to ensure that they can impose their predetermined plan for electoral reform while creating the façade of multi-party contributions to this important discussion. Worse yet, Prime Minister Trudeau has been clear that he won’t ask Canadians what they want in a referendum. While claiming to be a champion of democracy, Prime Minister Trudeau is refusing to use democratic means to make the greatest change to our democracy since Confederation.

This causes me to wonder what he and the Liberal Party stand to gain. Are the Liberals seeking to change democracy to keep themselves in power? The prime minister has already stated that he would like to see a preferential ballot system set up and it’s no secret that this system favours the Liberals. So why bother pretending that this Liberal Government cares what Canadians think when it has already calculated what is best for the Liberal Party? How can any political party make decisions on this matter dispassionately and without its own interests clouding its vision?

Canadians care about their democracy, so it matters how we choose to construct it. Taking the question to Canadians directly is the only genuinely democratic method that can legitimize any change to our electoral system. If the Liberals truly believe Canadians support their plan, they’ll have no problem letting them vote on it. Anything less is a distortion of democracy.